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Underground Rodents Have Better Eyes Than Darwin Predicted

April 6, 2004

European scientists looked into the eyes of African mole-rats, expecting to find retinas that had deteriorated due to disuse in the underground, lightless environment. What they found were several surprises that “call for a revision of our current views on the visual system of subterranean mammals,” reports a Max Planck Society press release. […]

Dumb Ideas

Science Reporters Stretch the Truth on Limb Evolution Claim

April 5, 2004

Item: some fragments of bone were found from a road cut in Pennsylvania. Conclusion: Darwinian evolution from slime to humans has been demonstrated again. Sound far fetched? Not if you are a science reporter for a typical news organization; this is common practice. The bone this time is a humerus of a presumed […]

Marine Biology

Sea Genes Multiply

April 4, 2004

A potential paradigm-shifting discovery has been made in the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea: there are many more genes in plankton than expected. Craig Venter’s Celera team sampled the genetic content of microbes off the Bermuda coast, and in 1500 liters of surface seawater, found 1.5 million new genes. Falkowski and de Vargas, writing about […]

Intelligent Design

Articles

April 3, 2004

The cover story of World Magazine for April 3 is a series of prophetic articles for the Year 2025, called “Darwin’s Meltdown: Intelligent Design scientists … ponder a future free from the dogma of evolution.” Looking back on how and why Darwinism declined into the “dustbin of discarded ideologies”, four intelligent design leaders, Phillip E. […]

Uncategorized

Evolutionary Cul-de-Sacs: Ferns Debunk Another Evolutionary Principle

April 2, 2004

“The principle of the evolutionary cul-de-sac is commonly invoked to explain the apparent lingering existence of once-diverse groups of organisms,” writes Torsten Eriksson in the April 1 issue of Nature.1 “Maybe that principle itself has had its day.” The case in point are ferns, which long had been thought to have been pushed […]

Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Suicide Terrorism

April 2, 2004

In a letter to the editor of Science April 2,1 Hector N. Qirko (anthropologist, U. of Tennessee) has come up with a Darwinian model to explain suicide bombers. His ideas build on an earlier model by Scott Atran (CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and Institute for Social Research, U. of Michigan) in a previous issue.2 Qirko […]

Education

Evolutionists Violate Church-State Separation

April 2, 2004

John G. West thinks he has the NCSE in a hammerlock. The evolution-only advocacy group, headed by Eugenie Scott, has used religious arguments to promote evolution on their new “Understanding Evolution” website (see 02/29/2004 entry). West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, writing for National Review, claims they are violating their own principle of […]

Physical Science

How Little We Know What Lies Below

April 2, 2004

Those cutaway views of the earth, with its core, mantle and crust, make nice diagrams in textbooks. But without a Hollywood-style probe and time machine to the center of the earth, how do we know what’s down there, and how it got that way? We know surprisingly little, admits David Stevenson (geologist, Caltech) writing in […]

Terrestrial Zoology

Validating a Just-So Story: How the Lizard Got Its Horns

April 1, 2004

As if smarting from criticisms that evolutionists trade in stories instead of evidence, Utah State biologists Kevin Young and Edmund Brodie, Jr and son decided to test an instance of natural selection. Their subject was the horned lizard of the southwestern United States, the misnamed “horny toad” kids like to catch. Many descriptions of evolutionary […]

Uncategorized

Quick Picks

March 31, 2004

Too many stories came in too fast at the end of March. Here are some we would have liked to explore in more detail. They’re all interesting and some have amazing facts and quotes. DNA vs. Evolution: A paper in the Royal Society Biology Proceedings1 warned that pleiotropy, the antagonistic effect of genes that need […]

Bible and Theology

In Defense of Men and Women, Body and Soul

March 31, 2004

The BBC News published a male-bashing article by Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of The Royal Institution, on March 29. It must have created a stir, because the next day, Prof. Steve Jones of University College, London, tried to restore the male ego. This was apparently a two-part documentary exploring what would happen “If women ruled […]

SETI

Arecibo SETI Project Draws a Blank

March 31, 2004

Project Phoenix, a 10-year project searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, found nothing, reports the BBC News. The project used the world’s most powerful radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to scan 800 nearby stars for signals. Project manager Peter Backus claims the team has learned a lot about searching for ETI, but concludes we […]

Uncategorized

Whoops; Coelacanth Not in the Family Tree

March 30, 2004

Sorry; they looked like they were evolving. The ungainly coelacanth, long thought extinct but then discovered alive and well in the Indian Ocean in the 1920s, had bony fins that evolutionists presumed were forerunners of limbs. Now, a report in PNAS1 says lungfish instead were the distant ancestors of us and our fellow land vertebrates. […]

Dumb Ideas

Swamp Gas Found on Mars

March 30, 2004

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has confirmed earlier detections of methane in the Martian atmosphere, according to the BBC News. Because methane could only exist in the atmosphere for a few hundred years, there must be a source that replenishes it. Two sources have been proposed: active volcanos, or living organisms. The BBC […]

Dumb Ideas

Jaw Mutation Led to Human Brain

March 29, 2004

The science news outlets like Science News seem to all jump on human evolution stories more than evolution stories about other life forms. Maybe that’s because we’re only human. This week’s entry concerns a story published in Nature1 by Stedman et al2 that a muscle protein mutation might be correlated with a change in brain […]

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